Alison Sawyer | Animal Kindred Spirit Award Winner & Author of No Urn for the Ashes

March 21, 2009

Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors! It’s my pleasure to welcome my next guest on the show. Her name is Alison Sawyer, she’s a writer and she’s the operator of the unofficial humane society of Isla Mujares in Mexico. She received the Doris Day Animal Kindred Spirit Award in 2005 and I can’t wait to talk with her about her brand new book, No Urn for the Ashes, a novel by Alison Sawyer Currant. Welcome to the show.

Alison Sawyer: Thanks a lot!

Dr. Kent: Tell me a little about this book.

Alison Sawyer: It’s a great book. I wrote a book that was the kind of book I would like to read because I’m an avid reader and I really know what I like and don’t like and it’s a great suspense story and the characters are terrific. I was so familiar with them I felt I was going to run into them in the street. My husband used to make fun of me when I was writing because my face would change with everything that was going on and he thought it was pretty funny to watch. It’s about families, loss, reconstruction; it’s just a great book.

Dr. Kent: What exactly inspired you to put this book together? You do a lot of work with animals; tell us about that and about giving in to writing this book.

Alison Sawyer: It was an interesting way that I got into it; 20 years ago my first husband and I got divorced and I went in with this group of women sort of a therapy group and we were told to write about the way we feel but I’m a very goal oriented person so it was hard for me to just write about how I felt. So I wrote everything in story form and I just loved it! I just loved doing that and that was 20 years ago and I’ve been writing ever since. I finished the book in June or it came out in June and I work with the animals in [inaudible] and most of the proceeds are going to go into our work with the animals.

Dr. Kent: Tell me about that.

Alison Sawyer: Well my husband and I moved here nine years ago and the situation then was pretty fierce. There were packs of wild dogs on the beaches and they would sometimes pack up together and get aggressive and the local response to that was to capture them and electrocute them or they would poison them; none of their solutions were very good solutions. When they were picking up the wild dogs or the ones causing trouble, they often picked up peoples pets as well because they didn’t discriminate that carefully.

We came in and people that work in the animal world that the ultimate goal here is to lower the population and the way to do that is with ongoing spay and neuter clinics. So that’s where we started; we started with we brought down veterinarians from the United States, we’ve brought them in from Mexico City, we had a vet here on the island and we’ll fund him to do it. We try to do at least five or six spays or neuters a week and the population has truly dropped dramatically.

Dr. Kent: Wow. I’m one of those people that are transfixed by the animal planet channel. I watch the shows about the Dog Whisperer and when some of these shows about going and picking up the dogs. I love my dog; we treat her way too nice.

Alison Sawyer: That’s great! I love to hear that!

Dr. Kent: About this novel; it’s set in the place where you work down in Mexico, right?

Alison Sawyer: Yeah, it’s set in actually five different countries, Canada, the United States, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Scotland. All places that I’ve been and one of the things I put in the book was a lot of history because I love to read a fictional novel but then learn a lot while I’m doing it. so I did a lot of research, which I enjoyed immensely and a lot of the book is in [inaudible] and its set in 1989 so Islam has changed a lot since then but it tells a lot about the history and what its like and what the streets look like, how the beaches are; and it tells the history of the island. People who live here are loving the book, they just love it and I even put myself in the book because one of the characters takes home a dog. So I mention the dog lady which would be me.

Dr. Kent: Do they call you the dog lady?

Alison Sawyer: They do! They call me a lot of things; I’m not always really popular with the locals because I’m making them change. Its much easier in their mind to do what they normally do, which is poison and electrocute the dogs and I’m very much in their face about it and I take in any dog that is brought to me; any dog, and bring it back to health because its usually a street dog or has been abandoned and needs medicine, vitamins, vaccinations, and lots of food and loving. I just took in a dog that I’d been worried about for two months. I knew this fisherman had this puppy; it looked like a little golden retriever.

I could see it from the roof next door and he would get rip roaring drunk and abuse the hell out of this dog and it just broke my heart and I sent the vet there to talk to him and did everything I could but I can’t just go in and steal a dog. There are limits to what I can do and then finally I guess he got really drunk one night, kicked the dog out and wouldn’t let it back in for three days. The neighbors nabbed it and I have it now. I couldn’t be happier; I called him Guapo and when he first came he would just duck when you put your hand out and now he’ll let us pet him and he’s doing better every day.

Dr. Kent: The ones that always make me so sorry is the dogs that you really have to nurse back to health over a long period of time. Have you run across dogs that you just couldn’t bring back to reality?

Alison Sawyer: I have but you know, not as many as you would think. I work with the vet here and the dogs stay with us. We’ve had up to 40 dogs at our house at a time and we separate them sort of by age and there is very many location specific diseases we’ve become very familiar with and know how to treat. Only a few have we not been able to save. It’s more a behavioral thing because the islanders are not very kind to their dogs.

They seem them more like possessions that are there for their entertainment so if they get to be a problem, they just throw them out in the street or take them to the city dump. I just sent a dog out to Minnesota today that had one ear and somebody had taken it and tied it up in a box and thrown it into the dump and some children heard it crying and brought it to me. Her name is Una and she’s all healthy and on her way to Minnesota to a rescue group there.

Dr. Kent: So we can find out more about you and your book at bayfirepress.com?

Alison Sawyer: You can find out about my book at bayfirepress.com but you can find out about the animal work at islaanimals.org and I put all the dogs that I have on there. The dogs that are up for adoption; I mean my ultimate goal is to get them off the island until we get the population under control. I write a newsletter as often as I can and it’s got a lot of information on there, and lots of pictures.

Dr. Kent: Isn’t that neat, I’m looking at it right now, I love dogs and I love looking at dogs and thinking about them. I sure hope they all find wonderful homes. We’ve got three minutes left; tell me where this book is available. It’s doing very well numbers wise, how’s it been treating you?

Alison Sawyer: It’s just been great because it’s the first book I published so you feel very insecure, you just don’t know what’s going to happen when you put it out there and everybody’s just loving it. You can get it on amazon.com but they’ve been sold out a lot, or you can email me and I can give people instructions on how to get it. It’s in a few bookstores but not in the major bookstores yet. So amazon.com is the best way to get the book. If they don’t have it they order it and we send it out. It’s been exciting.

Dr. Kent: Let me ask you about these puppies, the airport pups.

Alison Sawyer: Oh yes! I just fed them!

Dr. Kent: Do you go out and look for dogs? Do people call you and say hey here are these dogs we found? What do you go through?

Alison Sawyer: Exactly, people call me because I’ve been doing this for so long and a man named Cliff called me and said “I was walking down by the airport and this little puppy came out one of the drainage holes and I’m afraid he’s going to get hit by a car.” So I went down there and we got all five puppies and they were horribly dehydrated. They are just thriving; we’re feeding them and giving them lots of vitamins and electrolytes and they were very young when we got them, three or four weeks old, but now they’re four or five weeks old and just plumping up. They’ve all got little personalities and they are so much fun!

Dr. Kent: There’s a bunch of beautiful dogs on this site.

Alison Sawyer: We get a lot of beautiful dogs and we don’t send them out until they are healthy, vaccinated and behaviorally ready to go. It’s just been wonderful, in fact one of my favorite things is my before and after pictures which I have to concentrate more on because some of them are extraordinary.

Dr. Kent: Well it’s been a pleasure chatting with you.

Alison Sawyer: You too!

Dr. Kent: I’m happy to talk again down the road about dogs and writing. We’ll talk to you again.

Alison Sawyer: I’d love to!

Dr. Kent: We’ll talk to another guest in a couple minutes so come on back for that.

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